[lit-ideas] Re: Two Tongues?

From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:43:34 -0500

JL:

Why would we call normal a person with _non-literally_ two tongues?

Metonymy, dear poster, metonymy. The tongue is the organ essential to
forming the ridiculously absurd sounds of so many primitive and obscene
languages we hear about us. But the tongue must be forced like the feet of
Chinese girls of yesteryear or the extended necks of Ubangi women or the
disc lipped Mobali women of the Northern Congo, forced analogously through
years of torture to produce the sounds of one's native tongue (the one
tongue metonymy). All languages except the Mississippi Delta Southern
American English one, that is, we learn to speak it by sipping molasses.
Thus to learn a furrin language is to try to Cheneyize the tongue twice
over, as it were, to make it assume shapes it had never been forced into as
a supple young thing, and of which it had about as much hope of achieving as
it had of learning to leap like Baryshnikov.

I speak from experience. I tried to learn Danish to impress my Danish
sister in law, but at every sound I produced she laughed in scorn, and
ridiculed my spot on "murvflurvmagrrruuuvs". She, whose language sounds
exactly like a cow being waterboarded, dared say she couldn't understand my
English! I speak for all humanity when I say there's just no accounting for
some people.